Casualties

Battle Of The Bulge Articles

Battle Of The Bulge summary: The Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944–January 16, 1945), also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the largest battle fought on the Western Front in Europe during World War II; it is also the largest battle ever fought by the United States Army. It was a German offensive intended to drive a wedge between the American and British armies in France and the Low Countries and recapture the port of Antwerp in The Netherlands to deny the Allies use of the port facilities. The German codename for the buildup to the offensive was Watch on the Rhine (Wacht am Rhine). The actual offensive was codenamed Operation Autumn Mist (Unternehmen Herbstnebel). It fell far short of its goals but managed to create a bulge in the American lines 50 miles wide and 70 miles deep, which gave the struggle its alliterative name. The phrase “battle of the bulge” already existed in the American lexicon as a term for attempts to lose body weight.

The initial German attack force consisted of more than 200,000 men, around 1,000 tanks and assault guns (including the new 70-ton Tiger II tanks) and 1,900 artillery pieces, supported by 2,000 aircraft, the latter including some Messerschmitt Me 262 jets. In the opening phases of the battle, they would be facing only some 80,000 men, less than 250 pieces of armor and about 400 artillery guns. Many of the American troops were inexperienced; the German force included battle-hardened veterans of the tough fighting on the Eastern Front, but they, too, had green units filled with boys and with men who normally would have been considered too old for military service.

During the course of the month-long battle, some 500,000 German, 600,000 American and 55,000 British troops became involved. The Germans lost some 100,000 men killed, wounded and missing, 700 tanks and 1,600 aircraft, losses they could not replace. Allied losses—the majority of them incurred during the first week—included 90,000 men, 300 tanks and 300 aircraft, but they could make up these losses. In addition, an estimated 3,000 civilians died, some during the fighting and others executed by German combat and security forces. See "War Crimes in the Battle of the Bulge."

The Ardennes Offensive was a massive gamble on the part of German dictator Adolf Hitler, one that he lost badly.

Background to the Battle of the Bulge

By the winter of 1944, Nazi Germany’s situation was grim. Soviet forces were coming ever closer to the Fatherland from the east, and in the west Allied forces had crossed the German border. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler intended to launch a surprise attack in the west that would divide and demoralize the Western Allies and, perhaps, convince them to join Germany in its war against the communists of the Soviet Union. In May 1940, he had gambled on a surprise attack through the dense Ardennes Forest into Belgium and France and had won a stunning victory. Now he planned for history to repeat itself: once more German armor would advance through the concealing woods of the Ardennes to strike his enemies by surprise.

The German army commander in the West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, thought the plan too ambitious. Other commanders also objected to taking resources away from the Eastern Front for this operation, but Hitler overruled them all.

Field Marshal Walther Model’s Army Group B would be responsible for the attack. His forces included Generaloberst Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army, the largest and best equipped of the three striking armies, which was to drive northward, quickly cross the Meuse River and capture Amsterdam before the surprised Allies could regroup. Directly to the south of this force General der Panzertruppen Hosso-Eccard von Manteufel’s Fifth Panzer Army would push west in support of Dietrich’s attack. General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenburger’s Seventh Army would protect the southern flank. The build-up was given the defensive-sounding codename Watch on the Rhine. Strict security measures included no radio communication to prevent Allied radio intercepts.

On the opposite side, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower was planning major operations in the northern and southern sectors of the front. Accordingly, the center, where the German attack was to fall, was the weakest part of the line. The American VIII Corps, under Major General Troy Middleton, consisted of the 4th, 28th, and 106th infantry divisions, most of the 9th Armored Division, and the two-squadron 14th Cavalry group. The 106th Infantry and 9th Armored were green units, untested in combat. The 4th and 28th had suffered high numbers of casualties during operations in the Hurtgen Forest and were receiving thousands of inexperienced replacements. This small, largely untried force had been assigned an 80-mile-long front; normally, a corps would be defending an area only about one-third that length.

Elsenborn Ridge and St. Vith

The German attack achieved the desired surprise but often encountered unexpectedly tough resistance. Their timetable did not allow for delays, but time and again the Americans slowed the enemy advance.

The road network in the Ardennes was narrow and rough. A key road for Sixth Panzer Army’s advance ran parallel to a stretch of high ground called Elsenborn Ridge. Along this ridge, ad-hoc groups of tanks, tank destroyers and dug-in infantry stubbornly resisted. General Eisenhower, immediately realizing his men were facing a major attack in the Ardennes rushed artillery to support the ridge. The firepower from their guns left the narrow roads choked with wrecked vehicles, in addition to those that broke down on their own from mechanical failure. After 10 days of intense fighting, Sixth Panzer Army abandoned its attempts to cross Elsenborn Ridge and sought other routes.

Many villages saw intense fighting. Because of the road situation, towns where several roads converged were critically important; one such town south of Elsenborn Ridge was St. Vith, Belgium. At St. Vith and nearby towns, Fifth Panzer Army encountered stiff resistance; on the first day of the German offensive Eisenhower had ordered the 7th Armored Division to St. Vith to support 106th Infantry units. The narrow roads, ice, snow and mud prevented the Germans from massing their superior armor. The St. Vith pocket held until December 21 when, in danger of being encircled, the defenders withdrew. Their determined stand had thrown another monkey wrench into the German timetable. It bought time for the 82nd Airborne Division to set up strong defensive positions west of the town that blunted the enemy’s advance and temporarily pushed the attackers back across the Ambleve River. During the course of their engagements some units of the 82nd Airborne suffered over 80% casualties—the 509th Battalion reportedly took over 90% casualties—with most losses coming during the Allied counteroffensive that began in January.

Bastogne

To the west and south of St. Vith another crossroads town became the focus of intense fighting. When Eisenhower ordered the 7th Armored to St. Vith he also ordered the 10th Armored Division to Bastogne. It joined the 9th Armored, several artillery battalions, and infantrymen defending Bastogne and the small towns around it. On the 18th, the 705 Tank Destroyer Battalion arrived, and on the 19th the 101st Airborne. By the 20th the town was encircled by the advancing enemy, and on the 22nd, four Germans arrived with an ultimatum: surrender or heavy artillery will begin firing on the town. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe sent them back to their commander with a one-word reply: "Nuts." The artillery had already moved farther west, however, so the barrage was not forthcoming, though the Luftwaffe bombed the village by night.

On December 26, Bastogne’s defenders received a belated Christmas present: Lieutenant Charles P. Boggess with a few M4 Sherman tanks fought his way into Bastogne from the south. They were the lead element of a relief force from Lieutenant General George S. Patton‘s Third Army. When Patton struck with three divisions the following day, the German ring around Bastogne was broken.

End of the Battle of the Bulge

By this time, the Nazi offensive was running out of fuel, literally and figuratively. The Germans had waited for bad winter weather to launch their attack, to diminish the ability of Allied aircraft to support the ground troops. The weather also slowed the German advance, however, and this, the narrow roads and stubborn resistance wrecked their timetable. Improving weather conditions allowed Allied planes to take to the skies again and support the counterattacks that began pushing back the Germans. Despite a Luftwaffe offensive in Holland and a second major ground offensive the Germans launched in Alsace on January 1, the Third Reich could not regain the initiative. The Battle of the Bulge is officially considered to have ended January 16, exactly one month after it began, although fighting continued for some time beyond that date. By early February, the front lines had returned to their positions of December 16.

Articles Featuring Battle Of The Bulge From History Net Magazines

General George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge

By Stanley Weintraub

At a presidential press conference a dozen years after the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge, President Dwight D. Eisenhower confessed, “I didn’t get frightened until three weeks after it had begun, when I began to read the American papers and found…how near we were to being whipped.” On the enemy side, with Lieutenant General George S. Patton below the southern flank of the surprise German thrust, the high command under Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt realized the hazards of the Bulge from the start. Whatever the initial momentum, the operation had to succeed quickly. As bespectacled General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenberger acknowledged in ironic self-congratulation after­ward, “Patton had [already] given proof of his extraordinary skill in armored warfare, which he conducted according to the fundamental German conception.”

Whether or not he practiced the German mode of war, Patton, who wrote martial verse all his life, penned a rude rhyme in 1944 that roughly paralled Brandenberger’s principles. Advocating relentless pressure on the enemy, Patton urged unrhapsodically:

For in war just as in loving, you must always keep on shoving,
Or you will never get your just reward:
For if you’re dilatory in the search for lust and glory
You are up shit creek and that’s the truth, Oh! Lord.

Patton was never a role model for Sunday schools, and could be trouble even when the going was good. In army hospitals in Sicily in 1943 he had slapped two GIs whom he accused of malingering. General “Ike” Eisenhower, his commander, covered it up until the press was about to break the story. The embarrassment cost Patton, the engine of the Sicilian campaign, a prized command on D-Day in Normandy.

Then, performing the innocuous job of offering greetings at the opening of an English “Welcome Club” for servicemen in Knutsford six weeks before D-Day, he remarked that until that evening “my only experience of welcoming has been to welcome Germans and Italians to the ‘Infernal Regions’”—and he went on to predict the “evident destiny of the British and Americans, and of course the Russians, to rule the world.” He said he hoped that the war would come to “a quick conclusion, and I will get a chance to go and kill Japanese.” Subtlety was lost on Patton. Some British accounts of his talk omitted the Russians; others focused on his jovial brutality.

Exasperated with what seemed like another of Patton’s indiscretions, Eisenhower was ready to order him home—until Chief of Staff George C. Marshall cautioned, “Patton is the only available Army commander…who has actual experience fighting Rommel [who was then in charge of Atlantic Wall defenses] and in extensive landing operations followed by a rapid campaign of exploitation.” After enduring a dressing down from Eisenhower, Patton was left in England commanding a shadow disinformation army near Dover until, on August 1, 1944, seven weeks after D-Day, he was turned loose with the Third Army in France. He made up for lost time. He told his staff to hustle—an ounce of sweat was worth a gallon of blood.

The Third Army spearheaded the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead, stoutly defended by the Germans, who intimidated both U.S. Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, south of Cherbourg, and pompous Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, checked at Caen, while Patton raced across central France—until he ran out of fuel in Lorraine. “We are going so fast,” he wrote in hasty, often misspelled entries on slips of paper, “my only worries are my [military] relations not my enemies.” If he could keep it up, he wrote cockily, “I will be quite a fellow.”

Unable to maintain his momentum, Patton blamed his shortfall in fuel and supplies on Eisenhower’s need to placate the demanding, if sluggish, Montgomery. Patton was left to conduct a prolonged battle of attrition that ended only when von Rundstedt launched his unanticipated counteroffensive in mid-December, intending to take Antwerp, Belgium, and split Allied forces in Western Europe.

The Bulge—Eisenhower despised the label—exploited widespread intelligence failures. Americans have often been let down by intelligence lapses bred by complacency. The salient into the Allied lines was reaching perilously toward the Meuse River when, on Tuesday morning, December 19, 1944, soon after the counterattack in the Ardennes forest had gained momentum, a shaken Eisenhower convened key generals in Verdun. He traveled there from Versailles at 11 a.m. in an armor-plated Cadillac he had used since Algiers. Taking no chances, a security detail escorted him.

Adolf Hitler’s favorite commando officer, Otto Skorzeny, who had plucked Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans, had been leading Germans in GI uniforms taken from prisoners and the dead, and using captured American jeeps to misdirect units and sow confusion. One commando taken prisoner imaginatively declared that Skorzeny was out to kidnap Eisenhower. As a result, an otherwise unimportant look-alike lieutenant colonel was being driven around Versailles in Eisenhower’s hat and overcoat while the supreme commander, nearly immobilized by the empty threat, had left furtively for his meeting site.

The strategy session took place on the second floor of an old stone barrack surrounded by a sea of slush and mud. Warmed inadequately by a lone potbelly stove, the room was set up with large easels for displaying maps. There, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Bradley, General Patton, Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers, and Field Marshal Montgomery’s deputy, Freddie de Guingand, and their aides were to work out joint moves to blunt the German thrusts. (Monty would not deign to travel to meet with lower ranks than his own.)

Eisenhower unpersuasively described the fumbled defense crisis as an opportunity rather than a disaster, appealing for “only cheerful faces at this conference table.” Farther to the east, where the frontiers of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg met, the conferees knew that dismayed American divisions were still being mauled. Although Ike warned Patton about bluster and bravado, thinking big as usual, Patton offered: “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ’em up and chew ’em up.” Several at the table laughed, but Eisenhower interrupted sharply with “George, that’s fine. But the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.”

Eisenhower wanted the breakthrough blunted and narrowed. It had already disrupted plans to strike into Germany. Containing the bulge between the Belgian crossroads towns of Bastogne and St. Vith would limit the few viable routes by which the Germans could move reinforcements and supplies toward the Meuse. Despite the Western Allies’ continuing insistence that only unconditional surrender loomed—to allay Josef Stalin’s paranoia that the West might make a separate peace to let the Germans fight the Russians without an enemy at their backs—a desperate Hitler dreamed of striking a deal. A two-pronged attack toward the Meuse, threatening Paris, and toward Antwerp, the key Belgian port supplying the Allies, might not only frustrate the penetration of Germany itself but also buy time to develop more “miracle” weapons.

V-2 supersonic rockets, first launched toward London in early September, were a frightening beginning. However erratic the missiles might have been, there was no defense against them. The Luftwaffe was putting into production the first jet warplanes, which might dominate the skies. American troops, now bearing the brunt of the fighting, were stretched thin. “We are taking three trees a day,” an officer conceded, “yet they cost us 100 men apiece.”

Juggling operational boundaries, Eisenhower wanted General Jake Devers’ Seventh Army to move up from the south of France into areas from which Patton had planned to jump off into the Saar, and Patton to attack the southern flank of the Bulge below Bastogne. The Saarland, east of Metz and southeast of Luxembourg, Germany’s richest source of coal and a center of iron and steel production, was crucial to its further war potential. When Patton took Metz on November 22, it was the first time it had fallen to an enemy since a.d. 415. By December 5, he had four crossings of the Saar River in place. After that, weather and weariness had bogged the Third Army down, while even German reinforcements from the rubbish heap of the last reserves were fighting hard.

Inevitably, as the enemy advance divided Bradley’s army group, he would diminish into a minor player. His northernmost forces would be closer to Montgomery’s command than to Bradley’s own headquarters in Luxembourg City. “George,” Eisenhower instructed Patton at Verdun, with a diplomatic nod toward Bradley to keep him in the picture although Patton was now much on his own, “I want you to command this move—under Brad’s supervision, of course—making a strong counter­attack with at least six divisions. When can you start?”

“As soon as you’re through with me,” Patton claimed. “I can attack the day after tomorrow morning.” He had thought his moves out the night before, and did not mention that he had left three alternative plans with his deputy, Maj. Gen. Hobart Gay, in Nancy. All he had to do was telephone a code word to activate his troops. But he reminded Eisenhower that of the six divisions asked for, he had only three.

Patton noted in his diary that it “didn’t enter Ike’s head” that the other divisions called for “exist only on paper.” They had been battered in the Hürtgen Forest, above the Ardennes, in November and were still refitting. He had only the reliable 4th Armored and the 26th and 80th Infantry divisions.

Patton’s aide, Lt. Col. Charles R. Codman, recalled “a stir, a shuffling of feet, as those present straightened up in their chairs. In some faces skepticism [showed]. But through the room a current of excitement leaped.” Taking tens of thousands of men facing eastward, swiveling them north, and moving them—with their armor and supplies set up for a different thrust, and over inadequate and icy roads—to counterattack two days later seemed logistically unsound. Patton was confident he could do it.

Turning toward Bradley as he described his plans for the southern shoulder of the Bulge, Patton contended, “Brad, the Kraut’s stuck his head in a meat grinder. And”—he turned his fist in simulation—“this time I have hold of the handle.”

Others at the table raised worries. Patton spurned their concerns. He was taking the war directly to the enemy. He would have preferred to lure the Germans forty or fifty miles farther, then chop them off.

“Don’t be fatuous, George,” Eisenhower warned, reining in tartly what he assumed was Patton’s bragging. “If you try to go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready, and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second, and I want your initial blow to be a strong one! I’d even settle for the twenty-third if it takes that long to get three full divisions.”

In two hours the redispositions were settled. Eisenhower walked to the door with Patton. “Funny thing, George,” he joked, referring to his new five-star super-rank, “every time I get another star, I get attacked.” His fourth had come just before the Kasserine Pass embarrassment in Tunisia early in 1943.

“And every time you get attacked, Ike,” Patton retorted, “I have to bail you out.”

Bailing out the Bulge would be one of Patton’s finest hours, justifying his belated fourth star, granted only when the war was nearly over. Bradley, who had vaulted over his unpredictable partner, and Eisenhower, who held Patton back, continued to have mixed feelings about entrusting crucial operations to him. Yet both continued to demonstrate confidence in the overcautious Maj. Gen. Courtney Hodges, who had bollixed up the First Army situation on the northern flank of the Bulge. In effect, his shattered divisions were now going into receivership under the domineering Montgomery.

“I trust,” Ike would grumble to General of the Army George Marshall as late as March 12, 1945, “that the secretary of war will wait for my recommendation before putting Patton’s name for promotion. There is no one better acquainted than I with Patton’s good qualities and likewise with his limitations. In the past, I have demonstrated my high opinion of him when it was not easy to do so. In certain situations both Bradley and I would select Patton to command above any general we have, but in other situations we would prefer Hodges.” The difficult Ulysses S. Grant might not have made the cut in Eisenhower’s army.

Erich Brandenberger expected “a speedy reaction from the enemy.” He meant Patton. Yet he assumed that it would take Patton at least four days to wheel his divisions about, and the terrible weather—rain, sleet and snow—would be an additional handicap. Nevertheless, Patton’s troops began shifting north. He felt that Bastogne was as good as lost if he could not get there by Christmas. (The Germans had already taken St. Vith, on the northern shoulder.)

The 101st Airborne Division, surrounded and besieged, was holding the town precariously. Although the division and its supporting armored elements would be bottled up only for eight days, its airborne nature left it without heavy guns, and the tanks of Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division were a lightweight counterpart to the panzer divisions surrounding Bastogne. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st’s acting commander, knew that Patton’s forces were being alerted, but he had his doubts about how long the fragile 101st could endure. “Most of us,” he said later, rather ungenerously of Patton, “thought he never had a very good staff but he certainly accomplished miracles with it….Well, I mean the success of moving an unwieldy mass like that; to change your lines of supply, and everything, to turn that cumbersome, heavy-going outfit in the snow, in the fog and the rain, and turn them around so quickly as he did to get them going to the north, was really a remarkable task to accomplish.”

Patton had already thought hard about the operation, for he saw no other avenue for the relief of Bastogne. More than breaking a siege, the risky turnaround was essential to reducing the burgeoning Bulge. Yet the town was 125 difficult, wintry miles from the bulk of the Third Army. In two days and nights about a hundred thousand troops, with thousands of supply trucks, tanks, self-propelled guns, and other vehicles, had to slog over roads that barely existed beneath the mud, ice, and snow. Since blackout restrictions meant nothing in the poor visibility and lack of enemy air traffic, drivers kept their lights on. In the miserable terrain, communications teams had to lay and network nearly twenty thousand miles of wire.

To his wife, Beatrice, Patton wrote that “the staff of the Third Army, which consisted of myself and Sergeant [John L.] Mims [his jeep driver] visited two corps and five division commanders, and telephoned for the engineers, tank destroyers, extra tank battalions, etc.” It was over-the-top boasting, but Patton believed in hands-on oversight, whatever the hour or the weather. When he was discovered dining in style and enjoying vintage wines in a hotel in Luxembourg City, it had no bearing on where he had already been or would be going.

No admirer of Patton—the feeling was mutual—Montgomery sneeringly cabled his ostensible boss, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of staff in London, that Patton’s attack “went off half-cock” and predicted that the Germans would be able to keep going. In his diary on December 22, Brooke wrote, “German offensive appears to be held in the north”—now under Montgomery, but with almost no British troops committed—“but I am a little more doubtful about the south. Patton is reported to have put in a counter attack. This could only have been a half baked affair and I doubt it’s doing much good.”

On the same day, Patton wrote to Beatrice that the Third Army had “progressed on a twenty-mile front to a depth of seven miles.” He had “hoped for more but we are in the middle of a snow storm and there were a lot of [enemy] demolitions. So I should be content which of course I am not….We moved over a hundred miles [since] starting on the 19th.”

To augment his forces, Patton extracted eight thousand men from rear-area service troops, including clerks and cooks and bandsmen. “If others would do the same,” he wrote to Beatrice—he knew how swollen support staffs were in Paris and Brussels and even in Luxembourg City—“we could finish this show in short order.” His combined attacking force, including Maj. Gen. Willard Paul’s 26th Infantry and Maj. Gen. Horace McBride’s 80th Infantry, numbered 108 armored, infantry, and artillery battalions, with 1,295 guns of 105mm or larger. “I don’t see how the Boche can take this much artillery,” he said.

Yet the Germans bent without buckling. In the snow on the 22nd, a battalion of the 4th Armored lost thirty-three tanks to German guns. Patton had urged the III Corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Millikin, to “drive like hell.” They were still twelve tough miles from Bastogne. Despite the cost, Patton goaded Millikin to get close enough to hear the bullets “whistle” and push on through the night, although the weather was as much the enemy as the Boche.

“George,” Ike would ask, “are you still fighting?” When Patton conceded he was, Ike answered, “All right, that’s all I’ve asked of you.”

If the weather was God-awful, the responsible party had to be invoked, and the devout yet off-the-wall Patton intended to go to the source. The Christmas gift that Patton desperately wanted—clearing weather, to better move his armor and to allow air support of his operations—was not the kind supplied by Santa Claus. He told his Third Army senior chaplain, Colonel James O’Neill, that he was going to reclaim a prayer that he had O’Neill compose earlier when rain was delaying the abortive attack into the Saar. “Do you have a good prayer for weather?” Patton had asked. “I’m tired of these soldiers having to fight mud and flood as well as Germans. See if we can’t get God to work on our side.”

“May I say, General,” O’Neill recalled years later that he ventured to say then, “that it isn’t a customary thing among men of my profession to pray for clear weather to kill fellow men.”

“Are you teaching me theology or are you chaplain of the Third Army?” Patton responded. “I want a prayer.” Well-read, including all of the Bible, Patton knew that there were many prebattle appeals to the Almighty in Scripture.

Since Father O’Neill realized that Patton did everything over the top, he duly wrote something for the general, beginning piously: “Almighty and merciful Father, we humbly beseech thee, of thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us soldiers who call upon thee that, armed with thy power, we may advance from victory to victory and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish thy justice among men and nations. Amen.”

The rains of early December had now congealed into snow, and the Saar offensive for which the supplication had been intended had been canceled. When O’Neill reminded him of that, Patton said: “Oh, the Lord won’t mind. He knows we’re too busy now to print another prayer.” Patton had the text set in type in Luxembourg City and distributed on a quarter million wallet-size cards, with a holiday greeting on the other side that wished “each officer and soldier,” incongruously in the circumstances, “a Merry Christmas.” Patton added: “I have confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We march in our might to complete victory. May God’s blessing rest upon each of you on this Christmas Day.”

Feeling fully engaged in God’s work, Patton apparently worked his idiosyncratic improvements on O’Neill’s prayer for further use. The text surfaced after the war and was published by the national tourist office of Luxembourg. “Chaplain,” he explained to O’Neill, “I am a strong believer in prayer….Between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure….God has his part, or margin, in everything.” Patton saw God’s intervention in the unknown “breaks.”

On December 22, although Bastogne was short of food and fuel, and its only hospital was the floor of the local riding academy, McAuliffe rejected an ultimatum to surrender with the since-familiar retort, “Nuts!” An advance German unit was twenty miles from the Meuse. The vanguard of Patton’s Third Army was about that distance from Bastogne but proceeding at a disadvantage. As Army Air Forces General Otto Weyland, responsible for the Bulge area, put it: “The weather was so terrible. It was white when you looked down, white when you looked up.”

In Luxembourg City the next morning, thirty-three miles to the southeast, Patton set out alone for the ancient Roman Catholic chapel in the Fondation Pescatore, the massive, steepled, castlelike structure where he made his headquarters. The chapel was now a home for the elderly. Under the crucifix above the altar, Patton, although an Episcopalian, removed his helmet with its three stars, sank to his knees, and prayed earnestly his widely quoted prayer for the Christmastime success of his troops. In Patton’s quirky concept, God was the ultimate commanding general:

Sir, this is Patton talking. The last fourteen days have been straight hell. Rain, snow, rain, more snow—and I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on in your headquarters. Whose side are you on, anyway?

Patton emphasized he was there “to annihilate the Germans and the godless Hitler” and he appreciated how “You supplied excellent weather for our armored dash across France.” He added:

But now, you’ve changed horses in midstream. You seem to have given von Rundstedt every break in the book and frankly, he’s been beating the hell out of us. My army is neither trained nor equipped for winter warfare. And as you know, this weather is more suitable for Eskimos than for Southern cavalrymen.

But now, sir, I can’t help but feel that I have offended you in some way. That suddenly you have lost all sympathy for our cause. That you are throwing in with von Rundstedt and his paper-hanging god [Hitler]. You know without me telling you that our situation is desperate.

Patton described the terrible weather preventing the re­supply of Bastogne, hospitals full of frostbite cases, and wounded dying in the fields because they could not be brought back for medical care. He stressed his need for “close-in fighter-bomber support, and if my planes can’t fly, how can I use them as aerial artillery?” Without divine cooperation to improve the weather for reconnaissance, supply and battle support, he was stymied, he said, and, “Damn it, Sir, I can’t fight a shadow….You have just got to make up your mind whose side you’re on. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to your prince of peace.”

Patton claimed that he did not want to seem unreasonable or to ask for the impossible:

Give me four clear days so that my planes can fly, so that my fighter-bombers can bomb and strafe, so that my reconnaissance may pick our targets for my magnificent artillery. Give me four days of sunshine to dry out this blasted mud, so that my tanks roll, so that ammunition and rations may be taken to my hungry, ill-equipped infantry. I need these four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla. I am sick of this unnecessary butchery of American youth, and in exchange for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver you enough Krauts to keep your bookkeepers months behind their work.

After his “Amen,” Patton went back to work and hoped that God would attend to the modest requests enumerated—although the deity must have known that Patton had assumed unto himself an air force he did not command and an airborne division in Bastogne that was also out of his jurisdiction. He was appealing for the churched and unchurched alike.

That Saturday Colonel Harry Kinnard radioed from Bastogne that it was “getting rather sticky around here,” and that Patton’s 4th Armored “must keep coming.” Enemy tanks had broken through the southern perimeter. “Request you inform 4th Armored Division about our situation and ask them to put on all possible pressure.” Headquarters at the 101st estimated in Christmas terms that Bastogne had “one more shopping day.” Yet the weather was indeed changing. A “Siberian high”—whatever its source—was clearing the skies, and Allied aircraft again flew.

As fighter-bombers hammered German vehicles, Patton radioed John Millikin impatiently—and unreasonably. “There’s too much piddling around!” Patton complained from the safety of Luxembourg City. Tough German resistance, Millikin reported, had disabled eleven more American tanks. “Bypass those towns and clear them up later,” Patton ordered. “Tanks can operate on this ground now.”

Buoyantly, Patton credited his chaplain for the change in the weather. He later awarded the baffled Chaplain O’Neill a Bronze Star. Happily, if prematurely, Patton radioed to McAuliffe on the morning of the 24th, referring to Brig. Gen. Hugh Gaffey’s forward tanks: “Xmas Eve present coming. Hold on.” Preliminary Christmas presents had already begun to arrive, beginning at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd. Bastogne’s citizens, hearing the throb of aircraft engines, climbed from their cellars to wave. Resupply was underway, by glider and color-coded parachute drops.

With Colonel Codman, Patton went to a candlelight Communion at the frigid Episcopal church in Luxembourg City, which, below the Bulge, had remained quiet. The church huddled in the shadows of an enormous Catholic cathedral. “It was very nice,” Patton wrote, “and we sat in the former Kaiser Wilhelm’s box.” In World War I, “Kaiser Bill’s” army had overrun Luxembourg.

By radio, Patton had already learned that his 318th Infantry, after a six-hour truck ride in a long convoy, had arrived behind General Gaffey’s tanks to help force the way north. The drive toward Bastogne had ground down. Patton blamed himself. After the battle he explained: “I had been insisting on day and night attacks. This is all right on the first or second day of the battle and when we had the enemy surprised, but after that the men get too tired.”

Blunting the Bulge would not be easy, nor would it be cheap. Patton had underestimated the desperate resilience of the enemy. Most Volksgrenadiers and Panzergrenadiers were not fighting for Hitler now, but for their homeland. Beyond the dead and wounded in battle, many others perished, more than the numbers given in the official figures.

A Belgian-manned troopship, Léopoldville, built to accommo­date 360 passengers but loaded with 2,223 66th Division replacements, was torpedoed in the English Channel. In the darkness the crew saved themselves; 802 GIs were lost. The sinking was covered up for years. Allied prisoners by the thousands were shunted off to Germany with little food or water in freezing and nearly airless freight cars. Many did not survive.

On the morning of the 25th, Patton noted in his diary, “A clear cold Christmas, lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing whose birthday it is.” Bastogne was still encircled. The guns of relief elements could be heard but not seen. Patton spent much of his day visiting units of his active divisions to ensure, where possible, that his orders that every soldier in the Third Army have a hot turkey dinner on Christmas Day were carried out. (For most, it was welcome but less-than-festive hot turkey sandwiches with gravy.) Boisterous and noisy to stir enthusiasm in the sharp frost, he turned up day and night, helmeted but unescorted, driven by the ubiquitous Sergeant Mims in an open jeep with extra-large mud flaps, Plexiglas doors, and a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on a post. “He’d stop and talk to the troops,” Mims recalled, “ask them did they get turkey, how was it, and all that.” On one inspection, Patton stumbled over the feet of a GI who was zonked out under his jeep. “God damn it!” the groggy soldier complained. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

“At least one person around here knows what he’s doing,” cracked Patton, unidentifiable to the man below. His troops often swore at him, but also by him.

When Patton caught up with a column of the 4th Armored, still short of Bastogne, trucks and tanks were sliding off the icy roads—he called them bowling alleys—into ditches. “I only saw him once,” a GI told Beatrice Patton after the war. “We were stuck in the snow, and he come by in a jeep. His face was awful red, and he must have been about froze riding in that open jeep. He yelled to us to get out and push, and first I knew, there was General Patton pushing right alongside of me….He never asked a man to do what he wouldn’t do himself.”

As Patton neared the headquarters unit of the 4th Armored, an American plane strafed the area. He threw off his lap blanket and huddled in another ditch. By radio he heard from VIII Corps headquarters in the safety of Neufchâteau, to the west, that McAuliffe had called on Christmas Day to say that the finest present his troops could receive was their rescue, but that holding the Bastogne perimeter had its limits. When the 4th Armored failed to crash a corridor through by midnight, and, faced with German infantrymen riskily riding the backs of tanks and being toppled into the snow by small-arms fire from foxholes, McAuliffe called again to complain that the situation was desperate and he had been let down.

Patton was indignant—briefly. His troops were straining to their limits, and the Germans were giving up little ground. Using a favorite expression, he snapped, “There is no use getting into a pissing match with a skunk; so, unless they get too vituperative, I will leave it at that.”

Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ tanks made it through late in the afternoon of the 26th. The 101st’s greeting party, by McAuliffe’s order, was well-dressed and cleanshaven, to show that they had everything under control. With an aide, McAuliffe rode a jeep over to see Patton’s troops for himself. Captain William Dwight, second in with his tank after 1st Lt. Charles P. Boggess, scrambled out, saluted, and asked, “How are you, General?”

“Gee, I am mighty glad to see you,” said McAuliffe, happy to be reconnected. The day after Christmas was not too bad. And for the enemy, if not for McAuliffe, it was still Christmas. In Germany das zweiter Weihnachtstag persisted.

“Just now at 1845,” Patton wrote to Beatrice, “Gaffey called to say we had made contact. Of course we did not do it with much, but we did it. My prayer seems to be working still as we have had three days of good weather and our air [force] has been very active. Of course they overstate [their results] at least 50 percent but they do scare the Huns.”

Several days later, arriving in Bastogne with Marlene Dietrich, who had been entertaining Allied troops there before the German attack and now returned, Patton saw white-clad enemy bodies frozen in the snow, now with a second coating of white. “Finest battlefield I ever saw,” she recalled him crowing in his high-pitched voice.

On the northern shoulder of the Bulge, Montgomery, temporarily in full command, reflected that Bradley, “such a decent fellow” but in over his head, had mistakenly permitted Patton “to go too far,” yet Monty had done little more than hold the line with American troops. The British counted about a thousand casualties, two hundred of them dead. Admitted American casualties were 80,987, including 10,276 killed and 23,218 missing, including prisoners of war and unrecovered dead. The German count was higher. Patton’s Christmas wish was that Eisenhower would not give in weakly to Monty’s “tidying up the lines” panaceas. “If ordered to fall back,” he wrote in his diary, “I think I will ask to be relieved.”

On December 27, Patton returned to offer a thank-you at the Pescatore chapel, anticipating that the Bulge was the enemy’s final counteroffensive—as it proved to be:

Sir, this is Patton again, and I beg to report complete progress. Sir, it seems to me that you have been much better informed about the situation than I was, because it was that awful weather which I cursed so much which made it possible for the German army to commit suicide. That, Sir, was a brilliant military move, and I bow humbly to a supreme military genius.

The Bulge was indeed the last chance for the Wehrmacht to create a situation that might have forced, through frustration and disillusion in the West, some form of negotiation that might have forestalled the invasion and destruction of Germany itself. That did not happen.

Pressing eastward as the Bulge was flattened, Patton passed through the Belgian town of Houffalize, above Bastogne. He was appalled by its utter destruction as the Germans withdrew after mutually costly fighting. “I have never seen anything like it in this war,” Patton wrote. Giving in to his profane streak, yet still close enough to Christmas to exploit a carol, he penned yet another verse:

O little town of Houffalize,
How still we see thee lie;
Above thy steep and battered streets
The aeroplanes still fly.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
Not any Goddamned light;
The hopes and fears of all thy years
Were blown to hell last night.

At Oppenheim in Germany late in March, lost for words, Patton flamboyantly peed in the Rhine. Still, he seemed never lost for language that would plunge him into trouble. In defeated Germany he later explained to newspapermen pragmatically that to keep experienced civil servants working one needed to ignore their past Nazi Party membership that seemed to him mere “lip service.” Paying party dues to keep jobs had been “nothing but a form of blackmail….If we kick them out, all this bunch, we will retard the reorganization of Bavaria….”

It was not the first of his unwelcome postwar remarks, and the sum of them cost him his military governorship. Patton had an outsized genius for war, but not for peace. Transferred by Eisenhower to a paper-pushing post until he could return to the States, Patton got no farther than the American military hospital in Heidelberg. Critically injured in a staff car collision with an army truck on December 9, 1945, he did not see another Christmas. Patton died on December 21, 1945, and was buried in a cemetery in Luxembourg for Americans who died in the Bulge, six thousand of them from his beloved Third Army. It was Christmas Eve.

Stanley Weintraub, author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001) and Iron Tears: America’s Struggle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire (2005), has recently published Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge (all published by Free Press/Simon and Schuster).

This article by Stanley Weintraub was originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of MHQ Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ magazine today!

Battle of the Bulge: 687th Field Artillery Battalion’s Stand at the Crossroads Cafe

By John C. McManus

The men of the 687th Field Artillery Battalion hadn’t had a warm meal in four days. Ever since the Germans launched an offensive in the Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg on December 16, 1944, the artillerymen — and all the makings of their Christmas dinner — had been on the move. The day of the 19th had seen them firing in support of American defenders at various displacements around the Luxembourgian town of Wiltz. Just before sunset, however, they had run dangerously low on ammunition and were forced to retreat.

So when the battalion paused to regroup about six miles southwest of Wiltz at a quiet crossroads containing little more than a two-story café, it seemed a good time to break out the Christmas dinner; they’d likely be at the crossroads, known as Poteau de Harlange, overnight. The battalion’s commander, Lt. Col. Max Billingsley, and his executive officer decided to head into Bastogne, about 10 miles to the west, just over the Belgian border, to learn more about the situation. The battalion’s batteries set up around the crossroads: Headquarters Battery in the café; Battery A in a field to the west; and Batteries B and C lined up bumper-to-bumper in open areas to the north and south, respectively. Meanwhile, the battalion’s cooks prepared the special fare in the café: chicken and all the trimmings. When it was ready, the exhausted men formed a chow line and filed through.

Lieutenant Les Eames, an officer in the survey section, had just finished his meal when a GI burst into the command post in the café and yelled: “Small arms fire! Down the road!” The battalion had been outnumbered and outgunned in Wiltz. Now, with the ammunition nearly depleted, the odds were even worse.

While it wasn’t apparent at the time, the weary men of the 687th Field Artillery Battalion and other desperate groups of GIs played a critical role in the Allied victory during the Battle of the Bulge. By putting up persistent resistance against powerful and numerically superior enemy forces, those ragtag bands of American soldiers gave General Dwight D. Eisenhower enough time to rush reinforcements to the Ardennes and blunt the enemy offensive. Without their efforts to slow the Wehrmacht juggernaut, the battle might have turned out much differently.

On the heels of his comrade’s warning cry, Eames felt his heartbeat quicken and his blood seem to bubble like ginger ale. He and the other soldiers around him grabbed their rifles and helmets and poured outside. They heard the popping and rattling sound of small-arms fire in the distance. Corporal Arch Jack, a survey section clerk, was lying in a ditch, peering up the road, thinking that some GI was probably just trigger-happy. “The next thing, a vehicle turned lights full-on and headed up the road towards us,” he recalled. “There was a lot of hollering and confusion. I crawled in a shallow ditch all the way to the café with tracers zooming over me.”

The intensity of the distant shooting grew, and the vehicle kept coming, right at the 687th. No one could quite tell whether the vehicle was American or German. It looked like an armored car. Could it be an American vehicle but with Germans inside? Why in the world did the driver have his headlights blazing in a war zone?

Just across the road from the café, a halftrack with a 40mm anti-aircraft gun had been set up. The gunner decided to take no chances. He opened fire at the approaching armored car and scored a direct hit. The vehicle turned into a ball of fire. Machine gunners added to the carnage.

The vehicle, it turned out, held Americans. The M8 armored car was the point vehicle of a small retreating column of scout soldiers and 3rd Battalion, 110th Infantry, troops retreating from Wiltz. This group included the commanding officer of L Company, 110th, Lieutenant Bert Saymon, who was hanging onto another M8. Saymon and the others were now under fire from German troops on either side of the road, as well as their own 687th comrades. Another officer from this column managed to run into the café and inform his colleagues that there were two companies of enemy paratroopers from the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division just down the road.

No sooner had the warning come than the German paratroopers attacked the 687th, prompting a wild, chaotic, intimate fight around Poteau de Harlange. The Germans were everywhere. Tracers were flying all over the place in the dark night. Corporal Jack was under a truck next to the café, wondering what to do next. “All kinds of fire were going now — mortars, burp guns and rifle grenades,” he said. “A flare shell lit up the area. I saw a figure crawling toward [the] building and came close to shooting. I then hollered at him — it was a B battery GI.” Jack got up and ran inside the building.

Upstairs, on the second floor, Pfc Dick Atkins and Tech. Sgt. Gene Fleury were scrambling out of their sleeping bags, grabbing for their weapons and pulling on their boots. Atkins figured the building would be a magnet for enemy fire and he wanted to get out of there: “The Krauts used flares to light up the area and with each flare there was much more fire in our direction.” All over the house, Atkins remembered, men were yelling in confusion. Outside the enemy was hollering too, “calling each other by name but also yelling orders in German that could not be understood by us. By the sound of their voices, they had to be under the influence of something alcoholic.”

Like Atkins, Sergeant Fleury noticed the slurry, boisterous timbre of alcohol in the Teutonic voices: “They were drunk. They were cussing in German and calling us a bunch of names. They were saying: ‘No more zig zig [sex] in Paris!’”

The enemy paratroopers were very young, very frightened — but very excited. Many of them believed that they would make it to Paris for their own zig zig. Atkins and Fleury piled down the stairs and through the doorway.

At the same time, Captain William Roadstrum, the Headquarters Battery commander, was just outside the building. “What a psychology lesson that area was,” he said. “Guys just wanted to stand around by the building in the dark talking with each other. In spite of the bullets whizzing around and the grenades and mortar shells. They were…almost hypnotized by the situation.” Roadstrum tried to get them to lay down some fire at the enemy. He even slapped a couple of soldiers in the face, “all with little or no effect.”

Then he saw Atkins and Fleury. He looked at Fleury and ordered, “Sergeant, get two or three men and follow me.”

Fleury was a smart aleck in the best of times. He liked Roadstrum as a person but thought he was overmatched as a combat leader. He glanced at the captain: “Follow you?! Where are we going, Captain?”

In spite of his reservations, he went with the captain. Roadstrum, Fleury and Atkins exited the house out the back door, to the south, and worked their way along the road, at a crouch.

A few feet away, a good friend of Fleury’s from the wire section, Pfc Norman Morgenstern, was huddled in a ditch, pointing his rifle right at the three men, wondering whether or not to pull the trigger. “I can almost touch them,” he wrote in a present-tense account, “They don’t see me. Who are they? I strain my eyes. Friend or foe? I have the drop on them.”

The shapes moved silently past Morgenstern. He was very close to pulling the trigger but, for some reason, he just could not do it: “I let them go.” At that moment, he had no idea how close he had come to killing his friends. Morgenstern was Jewish, so he had no wish to become a prisoner of the Nazis. He was debating whether or not to discard his dog tags when more Americans plopped next to him in the ditch. Collectively, they retreated from the area. Morgenstern kept his tags.

Meanwhile, Roadstrum, Fleury and Atkins had worked their way to an embankment. “We lay flat and observed the Germans,” Fleury recalled. “Our trucks at that time had Christmas packages in ’em. They were going through ’em and throwing ’em all over. They were firing machine guns and mortar fire at us. They were honking horns and they were hollering at us.”

A mortar shell exploded mere yards away. Fragments tore into Fleury’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Roadstrum was not hit, nor was Atkins. Unaware that Fleury had been hit, they got up and moved west along the road, toward Bastogne. Fleury lay there in shock for a few minutes, his chest bleeding and one of his ribs probably cracked. About 50 yards away, he heard someone shouting to surrender and he wanted no part of that. “Bullshit!” he exclaimed, and he got up to run away. He later met up again with Atkins on the way to Bastogne.

In Battery B’s area, just north of the road, German fire was sweeping up and down the line of vehicles. Private First Class Lou Dersch, a 20-year-old kid from Baltimore, did not know what was going on. Soldiers from his battery were scattering in every direction. “I mean, we were facing German paratroopers and we hardly had anything to fight them with,” he said. The private had fired his howitzer’s last shell in Wiltz, shortly before Billingsley ordered the unit to retreat. It turned out to have been full of propaganda leaflets, which Dersch had watched scatter over the target area. They were now facing an enemy while terribly under-armed. “They were heavily armed,” Dersch recalled. “We basically had carbines. There were flashes and tracers everywhere. It was pretty bad.”

Dersch and two of his buddies made a run for their truck, but one of Dersch’s comrades was hit by small-arms fire. “He was badly injured, bleeding,” he said. Machine gun bullets were bouncing off the pavement, clanking against vehicles. Mortar rounds were exploding uncomfortably close. Dersch said he and the other man picked up the wounded soldier “and carried him all the way to the trucks, probably a few hundred yards.” They got him into a truck and took off. As they drove west to Bastogne, Dersch could not help but wonder what had happened to the buddies he was leaving behind. He felt guilty but was happy to have escaped the slaughter.

In the meantime, Lieutenant Eames was lying behind a hedge, just outside the café. Four feet away, a German soldier stood up and unleashed a burst from his burp gun. “I reckon I never will get flatter in my life than I got right then,” Eames recalled. “I felt bullets around my heels but none hit…a grenade went off close by too but still no holes in me.” He crawled through the doorway, into the café. The place was crammed with soldiers, including several wounded men who were howling and moaning.

On both floors, several men were standing at the windows, firing their carbines at unseen targets. The Germans were obviously closing in on the building, but in the darkness and the confusion it was hard to tell friend from foe. Staff Sergeant Walter Austin, a former steelworker from Pittsburgh, was in the attic, pointing his carbine out of a window, looking for a target. Bullets were smashing into the walls and floors of the building. “[They] were coming through windows and through the roof and through the floor,” he recalled. He fired one clip into the night, took out his pistol and fired it until the ammo was exhausted. Then he went downstairs to see what was going on there.

On the first floor, Major Ed German, the battalion operations officer, was contemplating what to do. With Lt. Col. Billingsley and his executive officer elsewhere, he had a growing number of wounded men stacking up in the hallways. It was only a matter of time before the enemy overran the café. German gathered together a group that included Lieutenant Eames and discussed their predicament. “Major German suggests we surrender,” Eames wrote in his diary, “to save piles of wounded & yet let the [batteries] make out as best they can.” Eames and the others agreed it was the right thing to do.

German passed the word around the house. He shined a flashlight outside and, able to speak German, asked to see the enemy commander: “Wo ist der chef?”

A few minutes later, enemy troops stormed into the café. Eames recalled hearing “heavy boots in the hall….[A] burp gun let [a] few rounds out against [the] ceiling to quell any overambitious soul.” The troops yelled at them to get out, bellowing: “Raus! Raus!”

Outside of the café, the Germans lined up the Americans and began to work them over. “These guys were wild and they were very young, no doubt teenagers,” Pfc Ervin McFarland wrote. “They were handy with their gun butts as they used them on many of us.” Anyone who did not keep his hands firmly on or above his head risked getting pummeled. Major German overheard one sergeant urging his men to shoot the prisoners, but a nearby captain squelched any thought of that.

Farther down the line of prisoners, Sergeant Austin kept his hands high and tried to remain calm. “They slapped and banged you around,” he said, “stripped you down, took…your watch, took your wallet, pen knives, and even made me take off my shoes.” As the German soldiers lined them up, Corporal Jack found himself shivering uncontrollably. “It was bitter cold standing in the open,” he said. “My hands were numb from standing…with hands over head. We were placed in columns and started marching east.”

Thus ended the debacle at Poteau de Harlange. An exhausted, under-supplied artillery unit was no match for an aggressive force of enemy airborne troops in this kind of close-proximity fight. The Germans captured between 110 and 125 men, many of whom were wounded.

Not surprisingly, Headquarters Battery was decimated. Battery A got away to Bastogne. Battery B lost 21 men, but escaped with most of its vehicles and guns. Both batteries later fought alongside the 101st Airborne Division during the battle for Bastogne. Battery C lost all of its equipment, including its howitzers, but many of the soldiers got away to Bastogne, or to Sibret, to the southwest of Bastogne. The 687th still existed as a unit, but it was badly mauled. Several more weeks would pass before an influx of replacements and new equipment brought the battalion back to strength. They fought well and served until the end of the war in Europe.

Even many decades later, the American survivors had little idea that their sacrifice had done some good for the Allied cause. Without question, the battle at Poteau de Harlange was one-sided, but it cost the Germans valuable time and organization. The Fallschirmjäger unit that overran the 687th was preoccupied with its new prisoners and loot, rather than a forward advance. The Germans’ timetable was upset, and they played no part in the looming battle for Bastogne.

Whether or not they understood their contribution to American victory in the Bulge, those who experienced the horror at Poteau de Harlange could never forget that night. Their nightmarish experiences, in combination with those of untold numbers of other Americans throughout the Ardennes, bought Eisenhower the time he so badly needed to strike back and win.

This article was written by John C. McManus and originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of World War II magazine. John C. McManus is a member of World War II’s editorial advisory board and a professor of U.S. military history at the University of Missouri-Rolla. His new book, Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible, will be published in March 2007 by John Wiley and Sons. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

Patton: The German ViewPopular knowledge is that the Germans so feared and admired the American general, they watched his every move. The truth is very different.

After the Battle of the Bulge, Nothing Seemed the Same—Even SnowWhen Frank J. Conwell was a child, wintry conditions meant frolicking outside in the snow. But in the frozen forests of the Ardennes, where Conwell served with the 1st Infantry Division’s 436th Antiaircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, the conditions meant something else altogether.

Hundreds of American GIs Held in Concentration CampAbout 350 American POWs who either were Jewish or appeared to be to their German captors were imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, according to survivors who have begun telling their stories in a series of special reports on CNN. Anthony Acevedo, a medic in the 70th Infantry Division during the war, was the first survivor to step forward with the grisly tale of the American soldiers held at Berga an der Elster, a subcamp of Buchenwald.

Omar Bradley, the General's GeneralOmar Bradley entered World War II as George Patton’s junior, but emerged as Patton’s commanding officer. Nevertheless, he found himself unable to emerge from the other man’s shadow. Bradley was inextricably bound to him.

The End of the Good War - Germany, April 1945For the American GIs entering the heart of Germany, April 1945 was a month filled with some of the most brutal fighting of the war, when the horrors of the Nazi regime were finally revealed to the world. Members of XIX Corps, the 90th Division, the 11th Armored Division's Combat Command B, and the 45th Infantry Division, among others, witnessed atrocities committed against their own and against those held in the concentration camps they liberated.

The Not-So-Great Escape: German POWs in the U.S. during WWIIIn an American Prisoner-of-War camp in Papago Park, AZ, German prisoners turn industrious to organize a breakout and plan their escape to freedom. During World War II, even a safe place like Arizona could be a battle zone, even if only briefly.

Battleground: ArdennesRelive crucial moments during the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge with Battleground: Ardennes, aWindows-based CD-ROM for $39.95 from TalonSoft (800-211-6504, http://www.talonsoft.com). With this hex-basedgame, you can dig in with the U.S. 101st Airborne Division defending Bastogne, take …

THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE The Battle of the Bulge, by Quanta Press (612-379-3956), is a Windows-based CD-ROM for $39.95 that details AdolfHitler's last desperate offensive in the West during World War II. This interactive multimedia title encompasses all aspects …

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